How John Locke's Legacy Is Paralyzing America

This
past Wednesday, Rudolph Giuliani, former New York mayor and one-time
GOP presidential candidate, appeared at the "21" Club in Manhattan to
attend a fund-rasing event that featured Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
According The New York Post ("Giuliani: Obama doesn't 'love
America'" by Geoff Earle, February 19, 2015), Giuliani told about 60
conservative business leaders gathered at the 21 Club that, "I do not
believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not
believe that the president loves America. "He doesn't love you. And he
doesn't love me. He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I
was brought up, through love of this country."

A front page article by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in the February 21,2015 edition of TheNew York Times reports that earlier that same evening Giuliani expressed indignation with PresidentObama
at another fund-raising event in Manhattan where he took issue with the
president's comments that compared the present Islamic extremist
terrorism to thedepredations that occurred during the Crusades.

The Times'
reporters state that a week before, at a realtors' conference in Las
Vegas, Mr. Giuliani also criticized the president's irresolute stance
toward President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and on February13, 2015, he
told an Iranian-American group in Arizona that Mr. Obama was not "a man
who loves his people."

Giuliani's
intemperate outbursts and his questioning of President Obama's loyalty
represent a new low in GOP demagoguery, but his comments need to be
remembered in the context of Samuel Johnson's observation that
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Giuliani's
twists and turns from a youthful supporter of Robert Kennedy, to one
who voted for George McGovern, to one who cavalierly changed his
politics once he was received an appointment in a Republican
administration raise troublesome questions about his own loyalty, his
core values and the sincerity of his political convictions. Giuliani's
behavior, similar to that of so many other spokesmen for today's GOP,
suggests that he will do and say anything that advances his own
political agenda and financial interests.

Giuliani is also an unmitigated hypocrite. Given his background, he is
hardly in a position to question anyone else's loyalty. He was raised in
a first generation Italian-American family as Roman Catholic. Prior to
John Kennedy's election, Catholics in the United States were viewed by
many "red, white and blue patriots" - today's GOP constituency - as
agents of a foreign potentate - the pope.

Giuliani
also avoided military service during the Vietnam War. As a student at
Manhattan College and NYU Law, he received student deferments from
conscription. Upon graduation from the NYU Law School in 1968, he was
classified by the Selective Service System as 1-A- i.e., available for
military service. Although he applied for a deferment, he was rejected.

In 1969, Federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon, for whom Giuliani was clerking, wrote a letter on his behalf to

Giuliani's draft board and requested that he be reclassified as 2-A - i.e., that he be given acivilian occupational

deferment as an essential employee. Thatdeferment was granted at a time when thousands of other ordinary

young men in New York City and elsewhere across the country- youngmen who lacked Giuliani's influential

sponsor - were conscripted andbecame potential cannon fodder in the jungles of Vietnam.

The following year - for some mysterious reason - Giuiliani was not called up for service, although by that

time he hadbeen reclassified 1-A. His favorable treatment was similar to theexperiences of two other

Giuliani is not unique among GOP "movers and shakers" and before he can beanointed
as the official court jester and resident buffoon of the Republican
Party, he will need to overcome stiff competition from the likes of
former GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachman, Iowa Congressman Steve King,
Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert,Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Texas Senator Ted Cruz,Ben
Carson and a legion of other lunatics and clowns. All of his
competitors revel in their anti-intellectualism, their unwavering
support for the 1%,their advocacy of unlicensed
gun-ownership, their abysmal ignorance of history, xenophobic fear of
other cultures and people who speak different languages, and their
abhorrence of science and the empirically-driven evidence that informs
its hypothesis and findings.

Once
upon a time, the Republican Party was a progressive political party
with big ideas about the future of the United States. Abraham Lincoln
endorsed a broad vision of policies and programs designed to promote the
general welfare. Lincoln defeated the forces of disunion and persuaded
the country to abolish slavery and to guarantee equal rights to all male
citizens with the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution.

Lincoln also signed into law the Homestead Act in 1862 that made
available millions of acres of government-owned land in the West for
purchase by settlers at substantially reduced costs. That same year, he
also signed into law the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, which provided
government grants for creation of agricultural colleges in every state
in the union. In addition, the PacificRailway Acts of 1862
and 1864 provided federal support for the construction of the United
States' First Transcontinental Railroad which, upon its completion in
1869, linked all the United States from coast to coast.

During
the First Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt pursued policies designed to
curb the excessive economic power wielded by the Robber Barons and their
trusts, condemned predatory practices by corporations, and spoke out in
support of organized labor.Roosevelt also successfully lobbied Congress
to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and The Pure Food and Drug Act.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the expansion of the national
park system and the subsequent transfer of the administration of the
park system from the Agriculture Department to the Department of the
Interior. As his successor, Republican President Howard Taft continued
Roosevelt's progressive domestic policies and vigorously enforced
antitrust legislation.

In
the early decades of the twentieth century also, Wisconsin Governor and
later U.S. Senator Robert LaFollette, Sr. enjoyed the loyal support of
unionized workers and farmers as a populist. An elected Republican
office-holder, he condemned laissez-faire and emphasized the need for
government to serve as an advocate for ordinary citizens, as opposed to
corporations and other moneyed interests.

Former
Congressman and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia burnished his
credentials as a reform politician and as a progressive who, appalled by
the excesses of the 1920s and the misery spawned by the Great
Depression, championed the policies of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. At
the beginning of the Roosevelt administration, he and Nebraska
Republican Senator George Norris successfully co-sponsored the
Norris-LaGuardia Act. That act declared yellow-dog contracts illegal,
forbade the federal courts from issuing injunctions against unions in
non-violent labor disputes, and prohibited interference by employers
against workers trying to organize trade unions.

Unfortunately,
the success of Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal subsequently changed the
direction of the GOP. Beginning with the passage of the Taft-Hartley
Act in 1947, the GOP, prodded by reactionary interests committed to
undoing the legacy of the New Deal, became increasingly hostile to
unions and supportive of business interests and Wall Street.

After
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a new Republican agenda
was cobbled together. Nixon's cynical and craven decision to adopt a
"Southern Strategy" required that the GOP abandon its historic
commitment to civil rights to attract the support of hard-scrabble,
disaffected white Southerners who felt threatened by the elimination of
Jim Crow.

The
rest is history. Within a decade, the "Solid South" became the preserve
of the GOP, whose rank and file members, despite their increasingly
challenged economic circumstances, have become unabashedly
anti-intellectual, anti-science, and hostile to unions, minorities,
women, public-sector employees, and to the idea that government should
be used as a positive instrument to promote the public good.

Ronald
Reagan delivered the coup de grâce. He successfully refined a winning
political strategy for the GOP by intentionally appealing to the most
base instincts of Americans. With his attacks on welfare queens and
"'strapping young bucks"' who used public assistance to buy T-Bone
steaks," Reagan further stirred the pot of racial animosity. His
insistence that government was the problem, not the solution, and his
endorsement of trickle-down economics was a repudiation of the GOP's
venerable heritage as an opponent of Social Darwinism; and his policies
repudiated the observation Republican jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
that "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

Lee
Atwater, who was Reagan's campaign strategist, described how and why
Reagna;s strategy worked: "In the 1980s campaign, we were able to make
the establishment, in so far as it is bad, the government, in other
words, big government was the enemy, not big business. If the people
think the problem is that taxes are too high, and government interferes
too much, then we are doing our job. But, if they get to the point where
they say that the real problem is that rich people aren't paying
taxes...then the Democrats are going to be in good shape. Traditionally,
the Republican Party has been elitist, but one of the things that has
happened is that the Democratic Party has become a party of [rival]
elites."

Reagan's
divisive rhetoric appealed to an increasingly distracted,
unsophisticated base of white males and females, and enabled him to
attract "Reagan Democrats" and other low-information voters. They did
not understand that the policies that Reagan set in motion - the
destruction of traditionalpension plans, the
privatization of pension risks through the creation of defined
contribution plans -aka 401K plans - with the enactment of the Employee
Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) - and the out-sourcing of jibs to
the third-world were inimical to their own best interests. Reagan also
successfully waged war against public unions with his destruction of the
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) during their
strike in 1981.

Since the Reagan era, the template has remained the same. But, with the adventof Roger Ailes and Izvestia-like propaganda outlets such Fox News, as well as the onslaughtof private, undisclosed 501C interests unleashed by Justice Scalia's 5-4 decision in the Citizens United case, the GOP strategists have become vastly more sophisticated and cynical.

In his Politics,
Aristotle insisted that man is by nature a political animal and that
one's participation in the life of a democratic state was the highest
form of human activity.Leo Strauss, a political
philosopher in the European conservative tradition, observed that the
proper object of political theory and inquiry is to discover the Truth
of the human condition. Measured by the standards of Aristotle and
Strauss, what passes for a discussion of serious issues and ideas in
American politics is woefully deficient. Our politics has been reduced
to the equivalent of a food fight in which the superficial - who's up?
who's down?who's loyal? who's a real American? - has become the standard by which our leaders are evaluated and chosen.

Sadly, the GOP alone is not responsible for the trivialization of American politics.Undoubtedly
media and the enormous infusion of money from corporations - with their
legions of lobbyists and super PACs sanctioned by the Citizens United case - have played a large role in the decline of meaningful political discourse, but they also are not alone.

Who
else bears responsibility? We all do. By our apathy, our lack of active
participation in the political system, our unwillingness to challenge
the lunatic fringe, and our tolerance of political lies, we have allowed
the democracy to which we claim allegiance to be gamed and stolen.

Howard Zinn once warned that, "If those in charge of our society -
politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television -
can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will
not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."
His fear is now becoming our nightmare.

It is a truism that elites, as Karl Marx noted, shape public opinion. A
century later, another German, Joseph Goebbels, remarked "If you tell a
lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it." It was another Marx who asked, "Who are you going to
believe, me or your lying eyes?"
It is also a truism that when elites feel threatened, whether from
external or internal threats, truth too often becomes a casualty. All
too often the defenders of the status quo seek to persuade the public
at large that those who are entrusted to protect their safety should be
given wide berth and the benefit of the doubt.

The events
surrounding the murder of the two New York Police officers and the
earlier refusal of a Staten Island Grand Jury to indict NYPD Officer
Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner have brought to the fore
once again concerns about truth, equality of treatment and the purpose
of public service. The other day, during CNN's coverage of the funeral
of NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu, these concerns were brought into sharp
focus.

Mr. Verni was given free rein to emote by Dana
Bash. He insisted that Mayor de Blasio had somehow disrespected the NYPD
by his failure to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the
New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, by calling into question
their policing tactics, by offering support to the demonstrators who
were outraged by the death of Eric Garner, and because the mayor had the
audacity to admit that he counseled his bi-racial son on the need to
react politely and obsequiously in presence of police. Not content with
those calumnies, Verni, echoing the nonsense uttered by BPA President
Patrick Lynch, contended that all of mayor's actions had made attacks
upon the police inevitable.

Missing from Mr. Verni's
narrative of NYPD victimization and unchallenged by Dana Bash was any
acknowledgment of the possibility that Verni was playing fast and loose
with the truth. Unacknowledged were the facts that Mayor de Blasio had
been in office for a year and that his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg,
had failed to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association for four years.

Verni
also neglected to mention that Mayor de Blasio had been elected by more
than 72% of New York City voters on a platform that explicitly proposed
the need for reform of police tactics, particularly after a federal
judge found that the "stop and frisk" tactics - as applied by the NYPD -
violated the constitutional rights of minorities. Verni was also
unwilling to concede that the overwhelming majority of protestors, in
the exercise of their first amendment rights, were aggrieved by the
refusal of the Staten Island District Attorney, Dan Donovan, secure an
indictment against New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo and that
they did not harbor any personal animus against the NYPD.

In point of fact, it was District Attorney Donovan's failure to
properly charge the grand jury that precipitated the subsequent events
about which Verni and the police union's leaders now complain. Although a
New York City coroner had ruled that Eric Garner's death was a
homicide, and there was compelling video footage of the police using an
illegal choke hold, DA Donovan allowed the grand jury to ignore the
explicit instructions of the New York Grand Juror's Handbook,
issued by the Unified Trial Court, that emphasizes, "The grand jury is
an arm of the court. It is not an agent of the prosecutor or the police.
A grand jury docs not decide whether or not a person has been proven
guilty. That is the trial jury's job. The grand jury decides whether or
not a person should be formally charged with a crime or other offense.
The grand jury makes that decision based on evidence presented to it by
the prosecutor, who also instructs the grand jury on the law. The grand
jury's decision must be based on the evidence and on the law."

Unacknowledged by Verni, and left unchallenged by Dana Bash, was even a
grudging concession by Verni that the NYPD, as a para-military force,
owed a duty of respect to their civilian commander-in-chief, or that
the present "work slowdown" by certain NYPD officers imperiled public
safety and violated the oaths taht they took upon their appointments.
Verni further chose to ignore the evidence suggested that Ismaaiyl
Brinsley's murder of the two NYPD officers was motivated more by the
latter's personal failures and his mental instability.

Left
unsaid also was any expression of concern by Verni about the ease with
which Brinsley, despite his extensive criminal record, was able to
secure a gun and ammunition. Rebecca Leber reported in The New Republic
(December 24, 2014, "How Did NYPD Killer Get his Hands on a Gun from
Georgia? Because Our Laws are Insane") that investigators were able to
trace the gun Brinsley used to a Georgia strip mall 900 miles away that
describes itself as a "family-owned business dedicated to good prices,
good customer service and good vibes." Leber noted that, as of 2010,
that single store was the fifth largest source of guns used in crimes
across the country, and the number one source for all out-of-state guns
seized by the New York Police Department.

As John Adams
observed, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, ur
inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the
state of facts and evidence."

The notion that police and
other law enforcement officials should be treated differently from
ordinary citizens is toxic in a democratic society and anathema to
principle of equal justice under the law. Equally corrosive are the
factual distortions that are propagated through the media by
well-educated individuals who surely must know better.

This
Christmas, many parts of the world are rent by violence, mayhem, and
increasing religious fanaticism and intolerance. Across the globe, the
gap between the few who are privileged and the many who struggle to meet
most basic needs grows ever wider.

Here in the
United States, our political institutions are paralyzed by gridlock and
dysfunction. Because of that, we are unable to address a host of
persistent problems including high unemployment and underemployment,
stagnant wages, a hallowed-out middle class, crumbling infrastructure,
gun violence and environmental degradation. Simultaneously, our judicial
institutions are increasingly unwilling to ensure of the equality of
treatment under the law or access to justice by those who are not
numbered among the 1%.

In
the midst of these profound problems, the Christmas Season summons to
put our aside despair, cynicism and pessimism over the present course of
events and to embrace a message of hope and the possibility of radical
change. The Christmas narrative describes the birth of a child to a
humble carpenter and a loving mother who, by the singular power of his
example and his message, was able to craft a demand for universal
justice encompassing all of humanity that resonates to the present.

In
this Christmas Season in particular, we should also be inspired by the
example of a humble Argentine Jesuit who has no army and no political
power, but who is able to lead by the power of his moral example. From
his demand for unconditional love to his insistence upon peace and
religious toleration, the Pope Francis has sought to reach out to all
people of good will.

In
a meeting with journalists on March 16, 2013, Pope Francis announced
that he would bless them silently, "Given that many of you do not belong
to the Catholic Church, and others are not believers." In a papal
address a week later, while he decried the "attempt to eliminate God and
the Divine from the horizon of humanity," he offered this comment about
nonbelievers: "[W]e also sense our closeness to all those men and women
who, although not identifying themselves as followers of any religious
tradition, are nonetheless searching for truth, goodness and beauty, the
truth, goodness and beauty of God. They are our valued allies in the
commitment to defending human dignity, in building a peaceful
coexistence between peoples and in safeguarding and caring for
creation."

On December 13, 2013, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium ("Joy of the Gospel"),
Pope Francis restated the historic essence of Catholic social
philosophy as he called upon people of good will everywhere, believersand
non-believers alike, to work for a better, more just world. The Pope
proclaimed that "The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by
consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet
covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a
blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its
own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place
for the poor. God's voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love
is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades."

In
unequivocal terms, the pope condemned the free market ideology that has
become the conventional wisdom of this post-modern world: "Just as the
commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to
safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt
not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.
How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person
dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two
points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when
food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of
inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the
survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As
a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and
marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of
escape."

The
pope continued his lament that, "Human beings are themselves considered
consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a
'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply
about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion
ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in
which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its
fringes or its disenfranchised - they are no longer even a part of it.
The excluded are not the 'exploited' but the outcast, the 'leftovers.'"

Pope
Francis' call for social justice is profoundly conservative, but to the
tone deaf, it sounds far too radical. He has reminded all of us that
the status quo is no longer acceptable because it is incompatible with
human dignity. Those who seek to know the truth of the human condition
will acknowledge this basic proposition. By contrast, the clamor and
indignation of the critics and naysayers are solely calculated to
vindicate the status-quo irrespective of the suffering and misery it has
spawned.

The
Gospel of Matthew admonishes us, "To whom much is given, much is
expected in return" and "What you did for the least of my brothers, you
did for me."

This
Christmas, people of good will everywhere might commit themselves to
the message of Pope Francis who insists that our collective capacity to
promote social justice is greater than the sum of reckless individuals
and feckless, unresponsive institutions that all too often pursue only
their own short-term, selfish objectives. An added but equally important
imperative is his insistence that we need to understand that we
ourselves are the only instruments who can bring about the change that
is so urgently needed.

The unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in the matter of IntegrityStaffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, et al
(No. 13-433, December 9, 2014) is further evidence that the alleged
commitment of the American legal system to equal justice is little more
than a sham and a platitude.

The
question before the court was whether the employees - warehouse workers
who retrieved inventory and packaged it for shipment to Amazon
customers - were entitled, as hourly, non-exemptemployees
to be paid for time that they were required to undergo antitheft
security screenings before they were allowed to leave the warehouse in
which they worked each day.

The record before the court showed that the class of employees who
brought suit under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938(FLSA) were routinely required to submitto security inspectionsand screenings that amounted to "roughly25
minutes per day" after they had checked out but before they could go
home. The employees alleged that the screenings were conducted "to
prevent employee theft" and they were intended solely "for the benefit
of the employers and their customers." The additional uncompensated
time, based upon a five day work week, amounted to an additional 6.8
hours at the workplace each week.

In
proceedings below, the U.S. District Court for Nevada dismissed the
complaint of the employees for a purported failure to state a claim
under Fed. Rule Civ. Procedure 12. The court held that "the time spent
waiting for and undergoing security screenings was not compensable under
FLSA" because the employees could not show that the screenings were an
indispensable and principal part of the activities that the employees
were required to perform."

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the
district court's decision, finding that "postshift activities that would
ordinarily be classified as noncompensable postliminary activities are
nevertheless compensable as integral and indispensable to an employee's
principle activities if postshift activities are necessary to the
principal work performed and done for the benefit of the employer," as
the record before the court showed.

Inexcusably,
the Obama administration - despite the consistent support that it has
received from organized labor - supported the employer's appeal and
urged that the decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals be
reversed.

Writing
on behalf of court, Justice Thomas disagreed with the Court of Appeals.
In an extensive and tortured exegesis of the language of the
Portal-to-Portal amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act that were
passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 to exempt employers
from liability for future claims for "activities which are preliminary
to or postliminary to said activities or principles." Thomas insisted
that question was the sole issue before the court.

Not
surprisingly, given his narrow definition of what he and the other
eight judges agreed was the sole issue before the court, Thomas opined
that "the security screenings at issue here are noncompensable
postliminary activities" because "Integrity Staffing did not employ its
workers to undergo screenings" and that the "screenings were not
integral and indispensable"' to the employees' duties as warehouse
workers. Left unanswered were the obvious questions: What
would have happened if the employees refused to wait for the screenings
and insisted upon their right to go home immediately after they finished
work? Would they still be employed the next day?

The
American legal system has long been a captive of the powerful, the
wealthy and the well-connected, and almost uniformly hostile to unions
and to the rights of workers. Throughout the nineteenth century most
state courts treated labor unions and strikes as illegal conspiracies in
restraint of trade.

With
the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the right of
all workers "to organize and bargain collectively through
representatives of their own choosing" was pronounced for the first time
to be national public policy. Other New Deal legislation included the
Walsh-Healey Government Contracts Act, which required the payment of
prevailing wages on government contracts in excess of $10,000; the
Railroad Retirement Act; and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which
provided for the first time, with certain exceptions, a nationwide
minimum wage floor and maximum workweek of 40 hours per week within
three years of its enactment date.

Since
the 1940s, however, the American labor movement has been forced into
retreat. After the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the election of a
Republican Congress in 1946, the rights of workers have been
continuously under siege. The first great success of New Deal critics
was achieved with the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, an act
that was passed over President Truman's veto. The effect of that
legislation was to outlaw "closed shops" and to permit individual states
to allow "open shops" - i.e. shops in which elected unions could not
require all of the employees to belong to the unions, irrespective of
whether the non-union employees also received and enjoyed the benefits
of collective bargaining.

As
a result of that Taft-Hartley Act, corporations began an inevitable
migration to the South where welcoming state legislatures hastily
enacted "right-to-work" laws. The migration of these manufacturing
companies away from the unionized urban centers of the Midwest and North
left hundreds of mill towns impoverished and desolate, and the union
movement was effectively eviscerated. Thereafter, it did not take long
for the owners of corporations to discover that, once they had escaped
from the threat of unionization, they could also escape almost all
government regulation by moving their businesses and manufacturing
operations out of the United States to low-wage countries in the Third
World.

Since
the advent of the Reagan administration, the assault upon the rights of
unions and employees has accelerated. The Democratic administrations of
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been equally culpable as reflected
in the former's support for NAFTA and the latter's endorsement of the
proposed TransPacific Partnership Agreement. They, too, have been
uncritical supporters of the myth that "free trade" is somehow a
positive good for the economy, despite all of the evidence that shows
that out-sourcing has been an unmitigated disaster for American workers
and has created soaring trade deficits that converted the United States
from an exporting country to a net importer increasingly dependent upon
foreign goods.

Because
of pervasive hostility to unions and the demise of organized labor as a
movement, the American workplace is increasingly governed by the
nineteenth century doctrine of employment-at-will. The doctrine of
at-will employment is a legal fiction that was created by state courts
during this country's first Gilded Age in an era. The doctrine
repudiated the long-standing presumption set down by Blackstone in his Commentaries
that any indefinite employment contract was for one year. Forty-nine
states - with the exception of Montana (which has abolished at-will
employment by statute) - still subscribe to that legal concept.

The
legal fiction of at-will employment essentially posits an equality of
bargaining power between individual employers and employees: Each is
free to accept or reject employment, resign or be fired without cause or
restriction. However, since employers in "union-free" environments are
legally permitted to unilaterally impose, almost without restriction,
whatever conditions of work they require as to hours, compensation, and
often restrictions on re-employment after discharge in the form of
non-competition agreements, the relationship is most often one of
inequality in which the employees are burdened and the employers
benefited.

The
market-based paradigm upon which at-will employment is based continues
to inform and control public policy decisions. It has also further
exacerbated the increasing economic inequality, destroyed the
livelihoods of American employees and made the American Dream to a cruel
hoax for everyone except the1%.

Historically,
those nominated as justices to the Supreme Court, with precious few
exceptions, have had little experience litigating cases on behalf of
employees or fighting for the rights of the downtrodden. With one or two
exceptions, this is true of the current court. In addition, as
graduates of elite law schools, with successful prior careers in the
private and public sectors, Supreme Court justices have cultivated
scores of influential and well-heeled friends and acquaintances over the
years whose values they share. One also suspects that they have never
forced to stand in a line to purchase concert tickets or have ever
shopped at Wall-Mart.

For
their efforts, the eight associate justices are paid $213,000 per
annum; the chief justice receives a salary $223,500. The justices enjoy
life tenure for good behavior; their pensions will never be lower than
their exiting salary should they choose to retire; they enjoy the same
generous healthcare available to all federal employees; they have
opportunities to travel to all judicial districts throughout the United
States and its overseas territories at taxpayer expense; and they enjoy a
minimum of 3 full months of vacation each year. For those reasons, the
chasm between the nine judges in the court and the hard-scrabble hourly
employees who toil for Amazon in its warehouses is vast, but is it
asking too much to expect a little empathy?

Sadly,
the unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in this case
is further evidence that all nine of the judges are tone deaf, oblivious
to the existence of economic and legal inequality, and unable to
articulatea vision of justice that does more than comfort the already comfortable and afflict the already sorely afflicted.

In
1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation for the first
national celebration of Thanksgiving. Over the years, Thanksgiving has
increasingly become a time for families and friends to gather together
and to collectively express their gratitude for the friendships that
they enjoy and the bounties that they have received. This year's
Thanksgiving presents a special challenge to us as citizens and as human
beings because it raises two important question that each of us should
answer: who precisely are our neighbors and should they be given a place
at our collective table?

courtesy of the New Yorker magazine

The
current debate - or rather hysteria - over immigration and President's
Obama's administrative decisions concerning undocumented aliens
illustrates how profoundly divisive the issue remains.

House
Speaker John Boehner accused President Obama of ignoring the will of
the American people and opined," President Obama has cemented his legacy
of lawlessness and squandered what little credibility he had left."
Rep. Mo Brooks ( R, AL) said there is a federal statute that made it a
felony to aid, abet, or entice a foreigner to illegally enter the U.S."At
some point, you have to evaluate whether the president's conduct aids
or abets, encourages, or entices foreigners to unlawfully cross into the
United States of America," and he added, "That has a five-year in-jail penalty associated with it."

Not
to be outdone, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn insisted, "The country's
going to go nuts," he predicted, "because they're going to see it as a
move outside the authority of the president and it's going to be a very
serious situation." "You're going to see -- hopefully not -- but you could
see instances of anarchy ... You could see violence."Senator
Ted Cruz urged congressional Republicans to fight back against
President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration, by refusing to
confirm the president's nominees until he reverses course."If
the president announces executive amnesty, the new Senate majority
leader who takes over in January should announce that the 114th Congress
will not confirm a single nominee -- executive or judicial -- outside
of vital national security positions, so long as the illegal amnesty
persists," Cruz wrote in a recent Politico Magazine op-ed.

Once upon a time every American school child could recite from memory Emma Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus:"

Although her words restated the official American mythology, the reality has always been quite different.

From
the very beginning, the earliest English settlers - Pilgrims and
Puritans- waged war against the aboriginal population and appropriated
the lands that the Indians had always believed that the "Great Spirit"
had given to all men in common. Early Colonial legislation restricted
the rights of Catholics, Jews, Quakers and dissenters to express their
religious convictions and were intended to make them feel unwelcome.

In
the 1840s, the Native American Party - the Know-Nothings - emerged in
the Northeastern United States in response to a climate of intolerance
and fear that had been preceded by the burning and sacking of an
Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834, and by frequent
attacks upon Irish and other Catholic immigrants.The
Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by
President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882prohibited all immigration of
Chinese laborers. Although the legislation was intended to last for 10
only years, it was renewed in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and was only
finally repealed in 1943.

Still later, the
Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants who
could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from
that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, which
was reduced from a 3% cap set by the prior Immigration Restriction Act
of 1921, according to the Census of 1890. The law was enacted to
restrict the immigration of Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, and
Jews. In addition, it restricted the immigration of Africans and
prohibited the immigration of Arabs, East Asians, and Indians. According
to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, the purpose of
the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity."

Depending
upon whose statistics one wishes to accept, before the financial
meltdown that began in 2008, there were anywhere from 12 million to 20
million illegal immigrants present in the United States. Although these
individuals violated American immigration law, their crimes were
compounded by the thousands upon thousands of American employers who
illegally employed and exploited them while feigning ignorance of their
status as ineligible employees.

There
are at least three proposals that would reduce the influx of illegal
immigrants into the U.S., enabled those who have met all immigration
criteria to quickly receive green cards, and enable this country to
control its borders without thousands of additional border patrol
agents, a even more militarized border, and the expenditure of billions
of additional dollars of taxpayer money.

First,
current federal laws require that prospective employees present proof
of citizenship or show that they are lawful alien residents. However,
the fear of government control along with purported concerns about
privacy and individual rights by privacy absolutists on the right and
left have stymied the adoption of a very simple mechanism to ascertain
citizenship status and to control immigration--a national identification
card, which virtually all policy analysts concede would be effective. As
an additional benefit, a national identification card would also
quickly resolve all of the political posturing about alleged illegal
voting.

By way of contrast, the European democracies - with the exception of the U.K., Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Norway-
have all embraced the use of national ID cards with little difficulty
or divisive political debate. In the United States, however, the debate
focuses almost entirely upon concerns about alleged government intrusion
and threats to privacy and individual liberty. Ironically,, the
enormous and intrusive amount of personal financial information and data
that Equifax, Transamerica and Expirian--three unelected, private,
for-profit credit reporting agencies--currently compile and maintain on
almost every American citizen barely elicits a critical comment.

A
second simple legislative fix would be to require all employees to use
the U.S. Department of Labor's E-Verify Program to ascertain the status
of all recent immigrants.Sadly, however, this proposal is
rejected by so many business owners who would no longer be able to
employ - and exploit - undocumented aliens and claim ignorance as to
their status.

A
third proposal - that might assuage concerns about continued
out-sourcing by multi-national corporations - would be to restrict the
number of H1B visas granted to foreign workers. Contrary to the claims
of many IT executives, for example, there is no shortage of educated
Americans able to perform IT jobs. Rather, there is an unwillingness by
corporations in the Silicon Valley to pay competitive wages. Why should
they need to, when H1B visas provide an endless supply of cheap,
unquestioning workers whose legal status is little better than
indentured servants?

The
endless whining about a purported lack of skilled workers in the U.S.
is a brazen effort to rewrite economic history and persuade a gullible
public and policy-makers to ignore the fact that the jobs of 162,000
U.S. architects and engineers were shipped to third-world counties
between 2000 and 2009, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics; and the
180,000 computer IT and programming professionals who, according to Yale
University's Jacob Hacker, lost their jobs between 2000 and 2004. Where
documented needs can be shown to actually exist, offering immediate
green cards and eventual citizenship to educated aliens with
identifiable skills that are in short-supply would benefit the long-term
interests of the country, rather than the short-term interests of some
employers.

Pervasive
economic insecurity, stagnant wages, fear of the unknown and, yes,
racism have all stocked the flames of resentment and made a rational
debate about immigration infinitely more difficult. However, if this is a
season to give thanks, it is also a time in which each of us should
reflect upon the struggles and tribulations of our forebears. Whether
they came her freely, in shackles on galley ships, or were dispatched by
covetous landlords and consigned to the steerage of a ship, after great
perseverance, they were able to carve out a life in this New World and
improve the lives of their descendants.

On
this Veterans Day, it is important to honor all of our veterans for
their service and sacrifices. Many young people will not know that,
prior to World War II, this day was called Armistice Day - in honor of
the "war to end all wars" - World War I. Obviously, that designation was
a misnomer.

As
we sit in our comfortable offices and homes today, we should also
reflect upon the terrible toll that wars inflict upon a country and its
citizens.Since the founding of this Republic, more than
1,300,000 military have perished in all of the wars, here and abroad, in
which this country has been involved.In addition, the
lives of the loved ones and those who have been left behind have been
forever profoundly diminished and saddened.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, this country has been continuously involved intwo
major misbegotten foreign adventures and a series of other
counter-productive and disasterous incursions in the Middle East in
which we are viewed as the invaders and in which we had little prospect
ofachieving "favorable outcomes." In addition to the 6700
military whose lives were lost, thousands more have been physically
injured or traumatized, and hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq
and Afghanistan have been killed and maimed.

When all of the accounts have been tallied and reconciled,the U.S. wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion,
including medical care for wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a
military depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a
study by a Harvard University professor Linda J. Bilmes, in a report
that was released in March of 2013.

According
to a another recent report prepared by the Peter G. Peterson
Foundation, the United States today spends more on defense than the next
8 countries combined. "Defense spending accounts for about 20 percent
of all federal spending - nearly as much as Social Security, or the
combined spending for Medicare and Medicaid. The sheer size of the
defense budget suggests that it should be part of any serious effort to
address America's long-term fiscal challenges." The report quotes
Admiral Mike Mullen, the past Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
"The single greatest threat to our national security is our debt."

As
of August 2013, despite the putative end of U.S. involvement in Iraq
and the winding down of the of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan,
there were approximately 1.43 million active-duty military personnel on
duty in thearmed forces of the U.S. States and more than 850,000 in the active duty reserves of all branches.

For
the fiscal year 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense and
military-related budget is $756.4 billion. That sum includes $495.6
billion for the base budget of the Department of Defense; $85.4 billion
for Overseas Contingency Funds for the wind-down of the War in
Afghanistan;$175.4 billion for defense-related agencies
and functions; $65.3 for the Veterans Administration ; $42.6 billion for
the State Department; 38.2 billion forHomeland Security;
$17.6 billion for FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice;
and $11.7 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration in
the Department of Energy. Because of the newly announced initiative to
confront ISIL, that estimate is likely to be far too conservative.

Further,
a recent "Base Structure Report" of the Department of Defense stated
that "the Department's physical assets consist of As one of the Federal
government's larger holders of real estate, the DOD manages a global
real property portfolio hat consists of more than 557,000facilities
(buildings, structures, and linear structures), located on over 5,000
sites worldwide and covering over 27.7 million acres." Most of these
locations listed are within the continental United States, but 96 of
them are located in U.S. territories around the globe, and 702 are
situated in foreign countries.

Currently also, the
United States has active duty personnel stationed in more than 150
countries. While many of these deployments involve assignments to
American embassies and special training projects overseas, the presence
of U.S. active duty military personnel throughoutEurope,
and in Japan and Korea remains significant, sixty-nine years after the
end of World War II in Europe and sixty-one years after an armistice was
declared in Korea.

More
than 100,000 active-duty American military are presently assigned to
these three regions, the cost of which is still largely borne by U.S.
taxpayers. Because of the U.S. military shield, the European countries,
especially Germany, and Japan and South Korea have been able to invest
in the modernization of their manufacturing sectors and to increase the
number of their exports to the United States at a time when American
manufacturing has been increasingly out-sourced to third world
countries. Japan and Korea, in particular, have adopted onerous,
restrictive trade policies that make it almost impossible for American
automobile companies and heavy equipment manufacturers to compete
successfully in those countries.

Since
conscription was ended as a result of the Vietnam War protests, and the
idea of an "all-volunteer" military gained enthusiastic favor among
military planners and defense contractors, ever fewer Americans have
been forced to decide, from a very personal perspective, their support
for foreign military adventures.

As
our professional officer corps has increasingly become composed of the
children of previous officers, and the ranks of enlisted troops
increasingly beckon to men and women to whom our country has extended
few other options, the concept of the citizen-soldier has receded from
the consciousness of most Americans. "Out-of-sight" has become
"out-of-mind."For that reason, President Eisenhower's
prophetic warning about the growth of the military-industrial complex
has metamorphosed into our collective nightmare and has become a
detriment to our ability to address urgent domestic needs.

War exacts a terrible toll on its perpetrators as well as its victims.
We are all diminished as citizens and as human beings because of our
indifference in the face of such horror. The best pledge that we can
make to one another on this Veterans Day is to demand an end to our
"welfare through-warfare" economy. We need to bring our troops home and
support international institutions that will promote ways to create a
more peaceful future for all of God's creation.

The current Ebola crisis raises
profound questions about whether the public health system of the U.S.
and our political institutions are equipped to cope with contagious
diseases and related, potential health emergencies. The answers to these
questions are likely to become more pressing in the wake of global
climate change and the significant ecological changes and population
shifts that are likely to occur as a result, along with the migration of
new and dangerous pathogens. The existing evidence is not reassuring.

First of all, our public health system is hopelessly fragmented.
Because the federal system of the U.S. is based upon vertical and
horizontal distributions of power, the responsibility for public health
in the United States, under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, has been delegated to state and local government, many of
which have inefficient and inadequately trained personnel who are
ill-equipped to deal with pandemics and other medical emergencies that
are not local in origin but that require a coordinated national or
international response.

Larry Copeland, reporting for USA Today
("U.S. lacks a single standard for Ebola esponse," October 13, 2014)
asked the question "Who is in charge of the response to Ebola?" Copeland
was reminded by Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for
Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota,
that "One of the things we have to understand is the federal, state and
local public health relationships. Public health is inherently a state
issue. The state really is in charge of public health at the state and
local level. It's a constitutional issue. The CDC can't just walk in on
these cases. They have to be invited in."

Copeland noted that
the Emergency Operations Center which was set up to address the Ebola
outbreak at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was comprised of
officials from Dallas County, the city of Dallas, the Center for Disease
Control, as well as county and state health departments and the Dallas
County Sheriff's Department and that "This was the team that made
decisions on matters such as isolating people who had been in direct
contact with Duncan, including his fiancée, Louise Troh, her teenage son
and two other male relatives."

Robert Murphy, director of
the Center for Global Health at Northwestern University's Feinberg
School of Medicine, expressed his opinion to Copeland, "In Texas, they
really were slow to the plate. Texas is going to be the example of what
not to do. The question is, who's in charge?" Murphy stated. "The states
can follow all the guidelines and take the advice, which they usually
do, but they don't have to. It's not a legal requirement. So there
really is no one entity that's controlling things."

Secondly, the public health system in the U.S. is severely underfunded.
In large part, this is because of austerity measures insisted upon by
the GOP's Congressional caucus and their ideological antipathy to
government in general. Joan McCarter expressed an opinion in the Daily Kos ("Republican
budget cutting nearly halved CDC's emergency preparedness since 2006",
October 16, 2014) that "The Republican fetish with starving government
has helped land West Africa in an Ebola crisis. The director of the
National Institutes of Health made that clear when he told Huffington
Post that steep budget cuts by Congress has set back the institute's
work on both prevention and treatment for the disease and that if it
hadn't been for a decade's worth of cuts, "we probably would have had a
vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and
would have been ready."

McCarter reported that the emergency
preparedness budget of the Center for Disease Control had been cut
almost in half during the past seven years. The CDC's discretionary
funding was reduced by $585 million during the 2010-2104 fiscal years,
and the annual funding for the CDC's public health preparedness and
response efforts were $1 billion lower in 2013 fiscal year than in
fiscal year 2002. As a result of these ill-considered measures, the
funding decreases resulted in the loss of more than 45,700 job in state
and local health departments during the past six years.

Third, partisan politics has exacerbated the response to Ebola. Intense
opposition from the National Rifle Association caused GOP Senators and
"pro-gun" Democratic Senators to put an indefinite hold on a vote to
approve the appointment of Dr. Vivek Murthy as President Obama's nominee
for surgeon general. For that reason, the United States lacks a
recognized medical spokesman with the gravitas necessary to assuage
public concerns and to provide accurate and unbiased medical
information.

GOP politicians and professional right-wing fear
mongers - who thrive in the current environment of scientific
illiteracy and denial - have also enthusiastically stoked the flames of
public hysteria. Rebecca Kaplan of CBS News (October 15, 2014 )
reported that New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown became the
most recent Republican to claim that a "porous" southern border could
cause to Ebola-stricken immigrants or terrorists to spread the disease
from Mexico into the United States. Not to be outdone, Texas Congressman
Louie Gohmert, a certifiable lunatic, lambasted President Barack Obama
for dispatching troops to Africa to fight an Ebola outbreak, and he
prophesied that they would bring the disease back to infect American
citizens.

Further, as public anxiety has risen, a number of
GOP legislators willingly sacrificed ideological consistency for
political expediency. House Speaker John Boehner issued a statement that
called for "a temporary ban on travel to the United States from
countries afflicted with the virus is something that the president
should absolutely consider."

Meredith Shiner, writing in Yahoo News
("GOP senators who opposed Obama 'czars' now want one for Ebola"
October 15, 2014), observed the irony that "Republican Senator Jerry
Moran of Kansas was one of the first lawmakers to call on the Obama
administration to appoint a czar to help coordinate the U.S. response to
the Ebola crisis in Africa, along with a cluster of cases at home. The
problem? Almost five years earlier to the day, Moran introduced
legislation urging Obama to cease the practice of appointing czars.
Moran, who was then a congressman running for the U.S. Senate, also
sponsored a bill that would prohibit the federal government from using
taxpayer money to pay the salaries of such unconfirmed administration
officials -- which would have effectively ended the practice of
appointing them."

Fourth, there is ample evidence that this
country's reliance upon a largely private hospital system and private
medical insurance, driven as they are by cost-considerations and
bottom-line accounting concerns, are not conducive to best medical
practices. The Associated Press reported on October 15, 2014 that Thomas
E. Duncan, the Liberian Ebola patient, was not placed in isolation
after his second visit to the emergency room at Texas Health
Presbyterian Hospital, but was allowed to remain in an open area of a
Dallas emergency room for hours, while the nurses who treated treating
him for days were not provided with proper protective gear and faced
constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released by the
country's largest U.S. nurses' union.

Deborah Burger of
National Nurses United said that she had received complaints that nurses
at the hospital who said they were forced to use medical tape to secure
openings over their flimsy garments, and they and were concerned
because their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient
with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting. The nurses also alleged
that other patients who may have been exposed to Duncan were kept in
isolation only for a day before being moved to areas where there were
other patients; that the nurses treating Duncan simultaneously cared for
other patients in the hospital; that, other than one optional seminar
for staff, there was no preparation for Ebola at the hospital; and that,
in the face of constantly shifting guidelines, nurses were allowed to
follow whichever ones they chose. Ms. Burger concluded, "There was no
advance preparedness on what to do with the patient, there was no
protocol, there was no system."

Other news reports stated
that, when a nurse supervisor insisted that Duncan be removed to a
isolation unit, a hospital administrator challenged her decision.

One suspects that a subsequent post-mortem will show that, despite the
hospital's tax-exempt status and its putative obligation as a charity to
give back to the community, Duncan was refused admission the first time
that he reported to the hospital because he did not have health
insurance, and that the reluctance of the hospital to place Duncan in an
isolation unit and to assign specialty nurses to him was also driven by
cost considerations.

The Word Bank reports that, as of
2012, the United States spent 17.9% of its GDP on a health care system
that still excludes millions of Americans because of the premiums
assessed by profit-driven insurance companies. These uninsured
Americans are among the most vulnerable in the event of an epidemic
because they lack access to primary care physicians and preventive
medical treatment, and they are the least likely to receive immediate
treatment for contagious diseases.

By contrast, the French medical system - which is viewed as the
best in the world - consumes only 11.7 % of that country's GDP. Canada -
which has a single-payer system - spent 10.9% of its GDP on health care
in 2012, while the U.K. and Spain - both of which have socialized,
single-provider systems - devoted 9.4% and 9.6% respectively of their
GAPS to provide free and accessible health care for all of their
citizens.

Further anecdotal evidence that suggests that high costs do not guarantee good outcomes is provided by Kevin Sack of the New York Times
("Downfall for Hospital Where Ebola Spread," Oct. 15, 2014). He reports
that the most recent 2012 tax filings for Texas Health Presbyterian
Hospital revealed that the hospital received $613 million in revenue and
had $1.1 billion in net assets. Further, the president of the hospital
at the time was paid $1.1 million.

In his important book, What Money Can't Buy, Harvard
Government Professor Michael Sandel warns that the values of the market
place are continuing to encroach upon and are displacing all other
values and measures of worth in our society. If everything and everyone
is for sale to highest bidder, and money is the sole arbiter, justice,
decency, compassion, empathy and what we owe to one another as fellow
human beings become casualties of the marketplace.

Lastly, our culture apotheosizes individualism, as David Brooks grudgingly notes in the New York Times
("The Quality of Fear," October 21, 2014). That pervasive worldview -
which provides the ideological rationale for our federal system of
limited, largely unaccountable and increasingly gridlocked political
institutions as well as for market capitalism - increases social
isolation and fuels suspicions of government, of science and in our
capacity to cooperate to address common concerns.

Erich Fromm observed in Escape From Freedom that,
"Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are
severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a
completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to
overcome the unbearable stage of powerlessness and aloneness. By one
course he can progress to 'positive freedom;' he can relate himself
spontaneously to the world in love and work...he can thus become one
again with man, nature and himself, without giving up the independence
and integrity of his individual self. The other course is to fall back,
to give up his freedom, to try to overcome his aloneness by trying to
eliminate the gap which has arisen between his individual self and the
world."

Sadly, it appears that far too many Americans today
are increasingly willing to surrender their true autonomy and sense of
confidence to irrational fears, and to permit non-elected, private, and,
more often than not, profit-driven entities to make decisions on their
behalf to our collective detriment.

Is
it in best interests of the United States to continue to arm and
bankroll Israel with billions of dollars of taxpayer money, while Israel
pursues policies that are inimical to thepeace process in the Middle East and, if unchecked, will inevitably draw the U.S. into further conflicts in that region?

On
Oct. 1, 2014, President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.The
meeting followed on the heels of Israel's announcement that its
government had approved the building of 2,610 new housing units in East
Jerusalem for Jewish settlers. The Israeli announcement had been
criticized by the Obama administration's spokesman Josh Earnest who
warned that the move would "distance Israel from even its closest
allies."

The
morning before Netanyahu's scheduled meeting with President Obama, the
Associated Press reported that Arab residents of Silwan neighborhood of
East Jerusalem awakened to find that Israeli security guards and young
male volunteers were protecting 25 apartment units in their
hard-scrabble neighborhood and in an adjacent area. The surreptitiouspurchase of those units represented the largest incursion by settlers since since rightwing Israeli Jewsbegan to buy properties through straws in that overwhelmingly Arab neighborhoodtwo decades ago.

The
organization that orchestrated the purchases of those units, the Elad
Foundation, described the acquisitions as perfectly legal and said it
had settled hundreds of Israeli Jews among an estimated Arab population
estimated of 30,000 in an area it calls the City of David - a place
where Jewish tradition holds King David established Jerusalem as
Judaism's central holy city.Consistent with the President
Obama's foreign policy objectives, Josh Earnest also condemned the
occupation of the properties "by individuals who are associated with an
organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between
Israelis and Palestinians."

During
his meeting at the White House, Netanyahu guardedly expressed his
support for a two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian
state at some future date, a commitment that he had studiously avoided
making at his UN General Assembly speech earlier. "I remain committed to
the vision of peace for two states for two peoples based on mutual
recognition and rock solid security arrangements. We should make use of
the new opportunities think outside of the box and see how we can
include the Arab countries to advance this very hopeful agenda,"
Netanyahu declared.

During that meeting, as reported by the Israeli media and the Islam Times, Netanyahuexpressed annoyance with the Obama's administration's criticisms of his support for the expansionof
settlers into Abab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank
after he had once again presented the President Obama with a two fait
accompli that would only further stock the indignation of the Israeli
Arab and Palestinian populations and render a two state solution as
virtually impossible. Public radio quoted the ever petulant Netanyahu as
urging US President Barack Obama to "study the facts and details before
making statements" about the settlement plan.

In
an interview on "Face The Nation" the following day, Netanyahu characterized
the administration's continued criticism of his party's support for
settler expansion as "baffling" and as "against the American values."
And it doesn't bode well for peace," he contended. "The idea that we'd
have this ethnic purification as a condition for peace, I think it's
anti-peace."

Ever
since the 1967 Six-Day war, Israeli settlements have continued to
expand throughout the West Bank, into East Jerusalem, and in the Golan
Heights that was seized from Syria despite. These expansions have
continued, notwithstanding condemnation by the United Nations which has
repeatedly stated that Israel's construction of settlements constitutes a
violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The International Court of
Justice has also stated in a 2004 advisory opinion that these
settlements are illegal and, in April 2012, UN secretary general Ban
Ki-Moon emphasized that the illegal expansion of the settlers in the
occupied territories "runs contrary to Israel's obligations under the
Road Map and repeated Quartet calls for the parties to refrain from
provocations."

WithinIsrael, the settlers -with the support of religious and secular rightwing nationalists - are determined to "reclaim" all of"Greater
Israel" - i.e. the lands of ancient Judea and Samaria that they claim
Yahweh granted to them in perpetuity. The fact that many of these
rightwing zealots may have recently immigrated to Israel from Brooklyn
or Odessa, or that Christians and Muslims have populated the lands of
greater Israel for more the past 1900 years are irrelevant to these
religious fanatics.

The continued expansion of the settler movement and the intransigence
of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition government would be
impossible were it not for the largely uncriticalsupport that Israel has enjoyed from the U.S. political establishment - including every presidentialadministration
since Harry Truman and an overwhelming majority of past and present
U.S. Senators and Representatives. Beating the drums for the Israeli
lobby are prominent mainstream Jewish organizations such as American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as well as various evangelical
Protestant organizations such as Christians United for Israel, and
rightwing billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson.

As
a result of the efforts of the Israeli lobby in the U.S., and a timid
political elite who are fearful of criticizing the policies of the
current Israeli government lest they be accused of ant-Semitism, Israel
has received more than 130 billion dollars of U.S. assistance since its
founding. Today, Israel has a GDP of over $130 billion yet the U.S.
continues to pay for 23-25% of Israel's military budget annually.

President
Obama's criticism of the settler encroachments in East Jerusalem and
throughout the West Bank do reflect the best of American values. Sadly,
the kind of territorial expansion that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his
extremist government endorse are, in fact, the antithesis: They are
reminiscent of the worst of this country's past- when this country's westward expansion was justified on the basis of an equallymessianic fantasy that wentby the name of Manifest Destiny. It led to the virtual extermination of the indigenous aboriginal population.

The difference today is that, while the Indians lacked firepower and
modern technology, Israel, the Arab countries of the Middle East and
Iran could easily ignite that region and the world in a conflagration
from which there will be no opportunity to offer subsequent mea culpas.

Rod Normand reports from Kabul in the New York Times,
that in his farewell speech, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan stated that
"America does not want peace in Afghanistan, because it had its own
agendas and goals here." Karzai continued "I have always said this: that
if America and Pakistan want peace, it is possible to bring peace to
Afghanistan."

In a previous story in the Times,
Thomas Erdbrink ("For Many Iranians, the 'Evidence' Is Clear: ISIS Is
an American Invention," Sept 10, 2014) reported from Tehran that
"Iranians are as obsessed as Americans these days with the black-clad
gangs roaming Iraq and Syria and killing Shiites and other 'infidels' in
the name of Sunni Islam. At the supermarket, in a shared taxi or at a
family gathering, conversations often turn to the mysterious group, the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and how it came to be. And for most
Iranians, the answer is obvious: the United States."

In the Boston Globe,
Brian Bender reports ("Stolen US-made equipment a key focus in ISIS
fight") that "Over the past six weeks, US warplanes destroyed at least
three dozen US-made Humvees that were by stolen by the Islamic State.
Earlier this week, Islamic State forces used Humvees to overrun an Iraqi
army post."Bender further reported that "The Islamic
State's reliance on American-made equipment has highlighted concerns
about plans to supply $500 million in high-tech weapons to the rebels
known as the Free Syrian Army. Congress approved the plan but the
majority of the Massachusetts delegation opposed it, with some basing
their opposition partly on concerns about where the arms may end up."

The hallucinations of President Karzai, those of many Iranians, and the U.S.'sinadvertent
arming of ISIS depict the magnitude of the challenge that this country
and its tax-payers have permitted President Obama to commit us to,
without informed discussion or debate.If history is any
kind of a guide, the president's attempts to cobble together an alliance
that would somehow bring peace and order to a disorderly part of the
world will prove to be naive and unlikely to succeed.

TheArab
allies upon whom president Obama must depend - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the
U.A.E., Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq as well as the non-Arab Turks - are
riven by conflicting tribal loyalties, increasing hostilities between
Sunni and Shia Muslims, and festering grievances against the West and
its secular democracies that date back centuries.Among
the historic grievances that many Muslims and jihadists often invoke are
the Crusades and the sacking of Jerusalem in 1099, the expulsion of the
Moors from Spain in 1492, the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Treaty of
Karlowitz in 1699, and the colonization of the Levant, Palestine, Egypt,
Algeria, Morocco by the French and British in the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries.

Since
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the rise
of autocratic governments, pervasive economic backwardness, illiteracy
and intense anger spawned by the emergence of the State of Israel -
exacerbated by Israel's mistreatment of its own Arab citizens and the
Palestinian population in its occupied territories - have created an
unstable region in which the grudging acceptance of other religious
faitrhs has all but disappeared. With the demise of the Ottoman
Caliphate, during the past seventy years the Middle East has become
virtually depopulated of Catholic, Orthodox and Nestorian Christians,
while the few who remain endure constant discrimination and persecution.
Sadly, the Middle East - which was the birthplace of Christianity - has
become hostile to the adherents of a major religion whose presence
there predated Islam by more than six centuries.

Today
in the Middle East the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, fueled by
fanatics as exemplified by ISIS, has made the Middle East even more
unstable. Islam's insistence that it alone has an exclusive claim to the
Truth - a Truth is derived entirely from the Qur'an which is accepted
as the unmediated word of the living God - has made the instability even
more intractable.

Islam
does not present a challenge to the Western world as a political
philosophy. Rather, it represents a challenge posed by a set of
religious dogmas that have been hijacked by Wahhabis and other
fundamentalists whom Saudi Arabia's theocrats have continued to support
through their funding of madrassas throughout the Muslim world.

The
religious extremists who have been brain-washed by the madrassas insist
upon interpreting the Qur'an as a rigid and unforgiving set of
religious commands. Their fanaticism has widened the chasm that
separates Western secular democracies from much of the Muslim world,
imposed insuperable obstacles that impede the development of civil
societies and their institutions, and constrained critical economic
development.Their demand that truly observant Muslims must focus upon
the next life rather than the present condemns millions of Muslims to
lives of penury and misery, and left many with only rage and a false
sense of victimization to sustain them.

Absent
the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation - or the Thirty Years War
followed by an edict of toleration such as in the Peace of Westphalia -
Muslims throughout the Middle East are not likely to embrace the idea of
toleration, as a central social concept, anytime soon.Until a new
generation of Arab leaders emerge who are willing endorse the idea of
religious toleration unequivocally and to also acknowledge the
importance of other Western notions - e.g.- that social
change can best be achieved through political discussion, through the
emergence of new ideas, and by the evolution of policies - the chasm
between the West and Islam will remain wide and deep, and the Middle
East will continue to be consumed by internecine conflicts.

If
ISIS and the multitude of other Muslim extremists are to be defeated,
the Arab countries themselves - and not the U.S. or the other Western
democracies - must rise to the challenge since they are the entities
that are directly threatened. Their soldiers and theirs alone should
provide any "boots on the ground" since the presence of Western
"infidel" soldiers only serves to reinforce the false narrative of
Muslim victimization by Crusaders.

For
their part, the United States and the other Western democracies should
show infinite patience, and they might consider collectively adopting a
policy of containment and quarantine, coupled with limited, targeted
strikes where and when needed. The expansion of the scope of air strikes
against ISIS into Syria and the siren calls for more ground involvement
by U.S. troops are counter-productive and inimical to this country's
best interests.

In
the long run, overreaction, bluster and jingoism, a President who is
too fearful to say no, a craven Congress, a supplicant media, and a
profoundly uninformed public serve only to engorge the ever- expanding
security-surveillance-military-industrial-welfare-through-warfare state
and its beneficiaries to the detriment of urgent, unmet domestic needs.

The
United States has little capacity or credibility to create stability in
a geographic region of the world where we are viewed as unwanted
intruders by a majority of the Arab population. President Obama needs to
be reminded that power brings with it the responsibility to exercise it
wisely and appropriately, and that sometimes restraint is the most
effective and prudent foreign policy.

The University of Paris economist Thomas Piketty has marshaled a wealth of impressive data in his book Capital in the 21st Century.
From an historical perspective, the data shows that the market-based
economies in the Western World - save for the brief, unique period
caused by the economic disruptions of two world wars - have spawned
increasing economic inequality.

Piketty also predicts that, without vigorous public intervention in the
marketplace - as the rate of return on investments continues to exceed
the rate of economic growth - economic inequality will continue to
accelerate. Not surprisingly, Piketty has been denounced on the right as
a neo-Marxist or a dangerous social democrat because he has had the
audacity to suggest, as a basic proposition of democratic governance,
that economic policy should be subordinate to political policy.

Simultaneously, Piketty's colleague and collaborator at the London
School of Economics, Gabriel Zucman, has reported in one of his many
studies, Tax Evasion on Offshore Profits and Wealth,that U.S. corporations now declare 20%of their profits in taxhavens - atenfold increase since the 1980s - and that tax avoidance policies have reduced corporate tax revenues by up to a third.At
the global level, Zucman argues that 8% of the world's personal
financial wealth is now being held offshore, costing more than $200
bilion to governments annually and that decisions to shift to tax havens
and offshore wealth havens are increasing.

In the current economic debate, Piketty and Zucman - along with a few
other prominent exceptions such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz -
remain the outliers in a profession that is overwhelmingly dominated by
defenders of the status quo and conventional economic wisdom. One such
pathetic example of the latter is Tyler Cowan, an economist at George
Mason University.

In an op ed piece in the Sunday edition of the New York Times last
month "(All in All, a More Egalitarian World," July 20, 2014). Cowan
enthusiastically cited a study which noted that, although economic
inequality was rising in countries such as the U.S., "the economic
surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most
egalitarian developments in history."

wealth-maximizing policies, andthat means less worrying about inequality within the nation...

[C]apitalism and economic growth are continuing their historicroles as the greatest and most effective equalizers

the world has ever known."

In a prior book, Average is Over,
Cowan extolled the rise of what he chronicles as the "big earners" in
the emerging meritocracy that he foresees. He also argues that, rather
than expand the safety net, governments should curtail spending.

As an alternative and to maintain civic peace, Cowan suggests that
local governments might offer engaging distractions to those whom he has
identified in his Darwinian dystopia as the "big losers" and the "zero
marginal product" workers. These "big losers" and "zero marginal
product" workers presumably include the 162,000 U.S. architects and
engineers whose jobs were shipped to third-world counties between 2000
and 2009, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the 180,000
computer IT and programming professionals who, according to Yale
Univesity's Jacob Hacker, lost their jobs between 2000 and 2004.

Perhaps taking an unconscious cue from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Cowan
proposes a palliative that he suggests would enable the 49% mooching
class that Mitt Romney decried to live contented lives, albeit with
reduced means and with substantially reduced expectations: "What if
someone proposed that in a few parts of the United States, in warmer
states, some city neighborhoods would be set aside for cheap living? We
would build some 'tiny homes' [that]...might be about 400 square feet
and cost in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. We would build some very
modest dwellings there, as we used to build in the 1920s. We would also
build some makeshift structures there, similar to the better dwellings
you might find in a Rio de Janeiro favela. The
quality of the water and electrical standards might be low by American
standards, but we could supplement the neighborhood with free municipal
wireless..."

Cowan's paen to globalization and the onward march of capitalism
blithely ignores the systematic, well-documented failures of the
capitalist system he extols. His apologia offers small solace
to the millions of Americans whose jobs have been lost to out-sourcing
and the de-industrialization of the U.S.; his soothing entreaty that, in
the long run, everything will work out nicely - some fine day - ignores
Keynes's sage observation that "In the long run, we will all be dead."One also suspects that Cowan would be less sanguine about the economic landscape he surveys if he were informed that his tenuredposition at George Mason University were about to be converted into an adjunct faculty position.

The defenders of the classical market model of unbridled competition
still refuse to concede that, left to their own devices, entrepreneurs
and corporations inevitably engage in practices that have harmful
consequences to the public. Their anti-regulatory biases are not
diminished, despite the fact that their business activities are heavily
subsidized by taxpayer money - e.g. roads, trains, airports, and
intangible infrastructure such as public education, employee training,
R&D, favorable tax policies, legal immunity for business entities,
and protection for trade secrets and intellectual property.

These guardians of the economic canon also continue to discount the
evidence that shows that entrepreneurs and corporations know that, if
they are unable to escape the ultimate consequences of their poor
decisions - if all else fails - they will be allowed to screw their
creditors, discharge their debts in bankruptcy, and re-emerge with anew corporate persona.
The sole goal is to maximize profits to enrich themselves and their
shareholders. Given a mind-set that sincerely believes that the pursuit
of self-interest is somehow a public good, they and their economist
defenders remain oblivious to the adverse effects of poverty, lack of
health care, pollution, climate change and to basic principles of social
justice.

Ultimately, the entire process is self-defeating and creates a
negative-sum game: As entrepreneurs seek to maximize their profits by
paying the lowest possible costs for labor and materials, the middle
class is hollowed out. As the income of the middle class contracts,
aggregate demand is reduced. As domestic spending contracts, the
purchase of goods and services contract. Without the intervention of the
government into market economies, the buyers and sellers of goods and
services become locked in mutually destructive death throes.

All of the empirical evidence, Cowan and other apologists
notwithstanding, suggests that out-sourcing, deregulation, austerity,
the commitment to the myth of "free-trade," -i.e. "laissez-faire" in
trade policies - and reduced government regulation have been major
contributing factors to the loss of manufacturing, stagnating wages and
the growing impoverishment of the former middle class.

The net effect of current economic policies - sadly endorsed by
Democrats as well as Republicans- has been an extraordinary
concentration of wealth and power into the hands of financiers and other
moneyed interests who have become the winners in this game of economic
Russian roulette. As a result, the decisions and predilections of fewer
and fewer individuals now determine the outcomes in the American
economy, while the overwhelming majority of Americans have little
ability to influence macro-economic trends or economic and political
policies.

In
the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith bemoaned the existence of "private
affluence and public squalor" in the America. The contrast has only
grown worse in the subsequent decades. The disparity between the few who
are wealthy and the many who are poor has widened alarmingly in the
United States since the advent of the Reagan era and the kind of
"trickle-down" economics to which he and his advisers subscribed.

In his General Theory,
Keynes observed that "the ideas of economists and philosophers, both
when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than
commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences, are usually the salves of some defunct
economist....But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests which
are dangerous for good or evil."

Political and economic philosophies, unlike religious dogmas, are
neither true nor false per se, irrespective of their competing attempts
to comprehend and to explain the Truth about the human condition.
Rather, these philosophies help us to define our understanding of
ourselves as political beings - who we think we are, and what we think
we can or cannot achieve as participants in the political process.Paradoxically,
through these political and economic philosophies, we simultaneously
modify and recreate social reality - "the shared field of meaning" - in
which we participate.

Equally important, because competing political and economic
philosophies inevitably suggest specific policies, they have important,
teleological consequences. For that reason, the consequences of any
particular policy suggested by a particular political or economic
philosophy can be observed, measured, and tracked.

As such, the political, economic and ethical effects of the policies
and programs can be scrutinized and evaluated. Policy makers and
informed citizens then become able to determine whether the respective
claims and promises of a particular political or economic concept should
be implemented as public policy, and whether the effects will be
beneficial or inimical to the health and vitality of the civil society.

There are no easy solutions to the present economic malaise, but it is a
serious mistake to confuse the purported "laws of economics" with the
laws of physics as so many do. Economic systems do not operate in a
vacuum; and there is nothing inevitable about the continuation of
economic trends. Economic systems and political systems are the products
of human imagination and ideology as shaped by historical forces.

Because there is nothing inevitable about economic trends and
developments, they can be countered by intelligent and carefully crafted
monetary and fiscal policies as well as intelligent legislation. In extremis, even the "laws of economics" can be suspended by operation of law, as was required during World Wars I and II.

The classical liberal paradigm of the market economy has long since
ceased to explain present day economic reality, but the intellectual
chains of that received wisdom from long since dead economists continue
to control the public narrative. Unfettered competition, based upon
allegedly free market decisions made by solitary actors in which goods
and services are sold to the most willing buyers, is a myth that does
not create individual opportunity for most Americans, nor has it
maximized business opportunities.

Rather, the insecurities of the marketplace persuade those who are
successful to institutionalize their advantages. Monopolies and
plutocracy are the inevitable result and, as the Forbes 400 list shows,
economic inequality becomes more pronounced.

The critical need in today's politics is to restore the proper balance
between the pursuit of wealth - as a purely private activity - and the
public interest. In a democracy, citizens have the ability and the right
to imagine and to demand new political, economic and social structures
and arrangements that are rooted in a shared commitment to social
justice and that also recognize the mutual obligations that we owe to
one another as members of a political community. By law, policies can
designed and imposed to protect the rights of workers to join unions, to
create an industrial policy, to re-impose protective barriers and
selective tariffs (just as China, South Korea and Japan now do), to
enact a tax code that punishes out-sourcing and domestic disinvestment
and provides incentives for job-creation and domestic reinvestment.

Market economies are affected by the frailties and the foibles of human
actors. Although many of these actors are motivated by selfish,
short-sighted concerns, the consequences of their actions harm everyone
else. It is for that reason that regulation in the public interest and
investment in public goods by the government - as the agent of the
people in a democracy - are essential antidotes to the temper the
excesses of capitalism and to create the foundations for a truly just
society.